But in her third year Gertrude both lost and found her way. She fell in love with a Bryn Mawr graduate, May Bookstaver, ‘a tall American version of the handsome English girl – upright and a trifle brutal’.
passionate yearnings
Gertrude spoke of ‘passionate yearnings’, longings and desires. Her academic ambitions ended. ‘Books, books, books’, she wrote in one of her essays, ‘is there no end to it. […] Nothing given me but musty books.’ May Bookstaver was already in a relationship with another graduate, Mabel Haynes, and from the start, Gertrude knew this might doom the love she felt. She explained to May that:
the middle class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me.
She believed physical passion, to be worth anything, must involve idealizing another. May told her, ‘You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud puddle.’
Gertrude told her she ‘feared passion in its many disguised forms’, that she did not understand it, it had no reality for her. ‘That is what makes it possible for a face as thoughtful and strongly built as yours to be almost annoyingly unlived,’ May told her. Gertrude declared herself ‘a hopeless coward. I hate to risk hurting myself or anybody else. All I want to do is meditate endlessly and think and talk.’ But then May ‘let her fingers flutter vaguely’ near Gertrude’s lips. Gertrude looked at the sky, talked of honesty, then found herself ‘intensely kissed on the eyes and lips’. She was unresponsive. ‘I was just thinking…’ she said. ‘Haven’t you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel?’ May replied.
From then on, Gertrude could not extricate herself from what became a clichéd triangular affair, albeit between three women. Mabel Haynes had the stronger position, the prior claim and a financial hold over May Bookstaver. Gertrude, the usurper, the affair, the mistress, the infidelity, was expected to hide her involvement, be discreet and self-effacing. She and May met secretly in restaurants and museums, for walks in the park, at the apartments of friends who were away.
As the affair wore on, Gertrude felt herself trapped in ‘unillumined immorality’. ‘I never wanted to be a hero, but on the other hand I am not anxious to cultivate cowardice,’ she wrote. She hoped some day to find a morality ‘that can stand the wear and tear of real desire’. There were no helpful models in her family. Leo wrote to her in Baltimore, from Paris, of nights that ‘cost me a hundred and fifty francs for champagne, eats, and the lady between midnight and six o’clock’. Michael’s wife, Sarah, who had given birth to a son, wrote to her of the wonders of motherhood and of her doctor, whom Gertrude would ‘adore meeting’, who treated girls for ‘self-abuse’ by giving them ‘very strong medicine to dissipate their sensations’. He said in cases of long practice the only recourse was to remove the ovaries. Sarah hoped Gertrude would marry this doctor, ‘were you willing and if you have not formed any prior attachment’.
Gertrude grew to hate the ‘turgid and complex world of divided emotions’. She longed for
obvious, superficial, clean simplicity… no amount of reasoning will help in deciding what is right and possible for one to do. If you don’t begin with some theory of obligation, anything is possible and no rule of right and wrong holds. One must either accept some theory, or else believe one’s instinct or follow the world’s opinion.
She favoured a theory of obligation, of fidelity to commitment made. Natalie Barney believed in her own instinct, which led her to many a bedroom and grassy glade. Gertrude hated the jealousy and complexity of a triangular affair, found the feelings it provoked destructive and hurtful and wanted commitment and trust. It was not a question of rules of right or wrong. She did not like provocation and insecurity. She did not care about the ‘world’s opinion’, which was antipathetic to same-sex relationship, but she did not want to be hurt, nor did she have Natalie’s polyamorous appetite. She wanted to replicate the safety she only fleetingly enjoyed before her mother became mortally ill.
In summer 1901, Mabel and May went on holiday together to Europe, leaving Gertrude waiting for infrequent letters. ‘The pain of passionate longing was very hard to bear.’ She wrote to May: ‘I am now convinced my feeling for you is genuine and loyal. I dread you giving me up. I dread more being the cause of serious annoyance to you.’
May replied:
Oh you stupid child, don’t you realise that you are the only thing in the world that makes anything seem real or worthwhile to me. I have had a dreadful time this summer.
There were jealous scenes, painful separations and intermittent ecstasy. Mabel read a letter May was writing to Gertrude:
She said she found it but I can hardly believe that. She asked me if you care for me and I told her that I didn’t know and I really don’t dearest… The thing upset her completely and she was jealous of my every thought and I could not find a moment even to feel alone with you. But don’t, please don’t, say any more about giving you up. You are not any trouble to me if you will only not leave me.
May Bookstaver was not going to choose between her and Mabel. The affair dragged on. Gertrude did no academic work. Her teachers
would ask her questions although as she said to her friends it was foolish of them to ask her when there were so many eager and anxious to answer. However they
